/lit/ - Literature

Hey, zizekstak here, figured I'd help a few of you out with a common stumbling block in understanding Nick Land (or, accelerationism more generally). I see a lot of people object to acc based on praxis; they don't think we should speed things up. however, praxis isn't the only aspect to accelerationism. Instead consider a spectrum, one axis runs positive to negative, the other descriptive to prescriptive. On the positive side you get Nick Land, who sees the posthuman as something to hasten, while someone like Ted Kazynsky on the other side would want that eschewed. Both (Late) Nick and Ted are prescriptive, they want to change social order to maximize their praxis. Someone like Mark Fisher was descriptive, not only did he not think accelerationism was necessarily in out best interest, but that we need to resist praxis until we have a decent theory worked out. Where Nick Land thinks it's good and should be advanced, Ted and Mark simply see it as a reality that needs to be dealt with. You can accept the premise "accelerationism exists" without concluding "that's a good thing" or even "lets help/hinder" the movement. At it's core, acc exists as "is" not "ought".